Tag Archives: weekend breakfasts

My grandfather, who celebrated his birthday this week (Happy Birthday, Grandpa!), reads my blog on his Kindle only he can’t see anything past the jump. (We’ve tried to fix it; can’t figure it out.) So as a birthday treat for him, here’s a whole post in one paragraph. It’s a recipe I came up with last weekend because I had pork/fennel/garlic sausage in my fridge and I wanted to make tomato sauce with it and use that sauce to make something with eggs. I could’ve cracked eggs on top and baked it in the oven like this, but that sounded boring. So here’s what I did: I cut two sausages out of their skin, added them to a non-stick skillet with olive oil, and broke them up over medium heat until the pieces were brown all over. Then I added some chopped onion and a pinch of salt, allowed that to soften, then added 3 cloves of chopped garlic. Once that was fragrant, I added all the tomatoes out of a can of San Marzano tomatoes with a minimal amount of the liquid, plus some more salt. Then I cooked that down for a while, allowing the tomatoes to break down and the liquid to reduce, until there wasn’t any liquid at all in the pan. At that point, I added six eggs which I’d whisked together with more salt, turned the heat to high, and allowed the eggs to set, sprinkling in some grated Pecorino cheese. Gradually, I stirred the eggs around a bit and when they were just firm, I scooped everything on to a plate and served with thickly sliced bread which I’d broiled on both sides, rubbed with garlic, and drizzled with olive oil, sprinkling Pecorino on everything at the end. Voila. If you make this over the weekend, send some to my grandpa.

Adam in the Bible was good at naming things, Adam the food blogger, not so much. I first called this “Caramelized Cauliflower Frittata with Onions, Cheddar and Nutmeg” then thought it was weird to emphasize the nutmeg, even though that gives you a clue as to the flavor profile. Next title was “Caramelized Cauliflower Frittata with Onions” which makes it sound very oniony though, actually, it is quite oniony: golden brown onions in with the eggs, pickled onions sprinkled on at the end. Finally I settled on “Caramelized Cauliflower Frittata” because that’s really what this is, a chance to use up leftover cauliflower on a weekend morning. And you know what? It’s one of the best breakfasts I’ve made in a long time.

Waking up on the weekend, one doesn’t want to get dressed. One wants to throw on a pair of shorts, veg out on the couch, listen to music and possibly read the newspaper. One–and I’m pretty much talking about myself here–definitely doesn’t want to go to the grocery store to buy breakfast ingredients. So what to do when there aren’t enough breakfast ingredients to make a normal breakfast? You make breakfast anyway.

Use what you got. That’s my best advice for cooking on weekend mornings. Make sure, on Friday, you’ve got eggs and coffee and some milk. After that, start your Saturday by raiding your fridge and putting together a breakfast that makes sense using as many disparate things that you can. Anyway, that’s my goal when I start my weekend and usually the breakfast that results is way better than one where I follow a recipe.

I’d like you to meet my breakfast from last weekend, Buttermilk Cornmeal Pancakes. These pancakes, which come from Cheryl and Griffith Day’s “Back in the Day Bakery Cookbook” intrigued me because of the cornmeal in the title. I’m not normally a pancake person because of a texture issue–I find them too spongy, too mushy when you add the syrup–but cornmeal seemed to suggest these might be crisper than normal pancakes. And guess what? They totally were. Craig called them the best pancakes he’d ever had for that very reason.

If I do a post on Friday, it’s usually because I have a weekend breakfast that I want you to make. There was that time I told you how to make eggs, biscuits and bacon; and let’s not forget these banana walnut waffles. This weekend, all you’ll need are a few stray Yukon gold potatoes, olive oil, salt, pepper, some slivers of garlic, finely chopped rosemary (use the fresh stuff) and a hard Italian cheese (Pecorino or Parmesan) and you can have this breakfast ready in no time.

What if you wake up tomorrow morning, tomorrow being Saturday, and you find yourself craving something savory, but you have all the ingredients for making French Toast?

Do you kowtow to your lazy, uninspired side and start heating the maple syrup, or do you allow inspiration to strike? Choose the latter path, the one less traveled by, and you will wind up with what I wound up with last week: French Toad-in-the-Hole!

This is a highly unnecessary post, especially if you’ve seen my post “Easy French Toast.” That’s my go-to French Toast recipe and the only difference between that recipe and this recipe is the bread. So why write this post at all? Because the difference between making French Toast with white sandwich bread (as I did in that old post) and making it with challah bread (as I do in this post) is like the difference between building a fort with pillows and blankets vs. building a fort with bricks, mortar and cannons. This French Toast blasts the other French Toast apart.